6/ Fast forward a century or two, and the atlas experiences its golden age.
The first explicitly named linguistic atlas was Julius Klabroth’s 1823 “Asia Polyglotta: Sprachatlas”, followed by Adriano Balbi’s 1826 “Atlas ethnographique du Globe”.
These atlases differ from modern ones because the data collected is mostly in comparative tables. The table below illustrates this point well, whilst the map magnificently shows isoglosses.
7/ The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of the two godfathers of language cartography, Georg Wenker, of Germany, and Jules Gilliéron, of Switzerland.
They were the first to place maps at the absolute front and centre of their atlases, and developed many of the key design and data collection principles used today.
Wenker's "Sprachatlas" lives on today in digital form at the University of Marburg: https://www.uni-marburg.de/en/fb09/dsa/projects/completed-projects/diwa
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